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AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
131–140 of 257 posts
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#132I find it interesting that the price of storage has essentially flatlined for the past five years, although the cost of hard drives have decreased by about 50 percent over that same timeframe dollar-per-gigabyte (https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2017/12/20/digital-...).
Innovations at the 'business' layer may be the best way to compete with AWS, in the way that it captures a large chunk of value generated through OSS. Decentralized cloud platforms essentially take the principles of open source and apply them to the very infrastructure on which software runs.
At Storj, for example, we have an Open Source Partner Program that attempts to solve the ‘Amazon Problem’ by enabling any open source project to generate revenue every time their end users store data in the cloud.
Storj tracks usage on the network and returns a significant portion of the revenue earned when data from an open source project is stored on the platform. Critically, this enables open source projects to derive sustainable revenue from usage, whether by commercial customers or non-paying open source users.
In my opinion, this can help drive and support the next wave of Open Source monetization models (essentially through this concept of 'Commoditize Your Complement" - where the complement is cloud consumption)
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those aren't Open Source licenses, so that's the same as the suggestion in the parent comment to make the software proprietary and charge for licenses.
Parity is an open source license that should achieve the goal of contribution sharing better than the others since it's wording focuses on changes, not distribution models. https://licensezero.com/licenses/parity It also has a patent license, unlike many permissive ones. They shouldnt even qualify as open source if you can get sued under patent law for using that software. Need some patent protection in license.
> Parity is an open source license
No, it isn't: https://opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical
A few issues:
> 3. Contribute software you develop, deploy, monitor, or run with this software.
That goes farther than the OSI, FSF, or DFSG allows, extending into software that is not in any way derived from the licensed software.
It's also not obvious from the license that it allows private modifications that aren't distributed to anyone.
> To contribute software, publish all its source code, in the preferred form for making changes, through a freely accessible distribution system widely used for similar source code
This requires that you publish your code publicly, rather than just providing it to those you provide binaries to.
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#134MongoDB is choosing a dinosaurs business model, and it's going to hurt them and their ecology.
Mongo the org should play MongoDB like Google does Kubernetes, Golang, Chromium, etc. Have your people in there, funded, steering the project as 'FOSS' while you release actual products.
Mongo dropped the ball by having no on-ramp product like GCPs Firebase. Their Cloud provider hate is just a flailing reaction to bad business and existential fear.
Stop being a crybaby when someone makes a few forms and buttons that spins up a vm with your DB software running. Of course cloud providers would want a tight integration with their systems.
Managed Kubernetes on AWS makes k8 stronger, managed Firecracker on GCP and Azure makes Firecracker stronger.
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#135I find it interesting that the price of storage has essentially flatlined for the past five years, although the cost of hard drives have decreased by about 50 percent over that same timeframe dollar-per-gigabyte ( https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomcoughlin/2017/12/20/digital-... ). Innovations at the 'business' layer may be the best way to compete with AWS, in the way that it captures a large chunk of value generated t…
Perhaps this is a good idea in theory, but it’s lacking in implementation. Having used Storj in the past, I’ve found it to be the least reliable service I’ve ever used. The SLA excludes events beyond your control, which sadly includes the availability of your storage network. I wouldn’t say this solution is even close to being production ready.
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#136[deleted]
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
"IMHO redhat deserves its money". I agree. But the vast majority of people employ CentOS which is redhats derivative. Oracle engineers work hard on java and deserve their money but the vast majority of people employ OpenJDK which is OracleJDKs derivative.
OpenJDK is a pretty significant rewrite of the Sun/Oracle JDK to stay open and completely GPL. CentOS is more of a repackaging of Redhat -- the binary files are almost exactly the same there so the comparison isn't quite valid.
You're thinking of GNU Classpath, maybe?
OpenJDK is (a subset of) the Oracle JDK.
> OpenJDK is the official reference implementation of Java SE since version 7.
and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenJDK#Release_of_the_class_l...
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Red Hat does not have any "for-fee bolt-on addons", everything we ship is open source (or will be soon after acquisition of a closed-source company). Responding to some of the other comments, Red Hat revenue is nearly all from providing enterprise support for completely open source software. This is critically different from "services", ie consulting. These are yearly contracts that provide clients insurance if/when…
To say "everything" Red Hat ships being open source isn't quite true. There's a lot of proprietary code floating around, especially in the supporting infrastructure. When a product is put together, the upstream sources are bundled together and released - often behind the paywall. Paul Cormier has it right - "We're an enterprise software company with an open source development model". Not an open source company. Howev…
The only software that redhat "sells" that is not open source is: RHN and insights. Former would be pointless to open, the latter is virtually a service offering anyway.
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#139> It is hard to imagine [AWS, Microsoft, and Google] ever paying for open source software. It's surprising that someone setting out to write about the changing economies of open source ends up missing the point so thoroughly. These companies are some of the biggest contributors to open source. What they aren't likely to want to pay for is a site license from some company trying to sell them a MongoDB under terms prac…
> These companies [AWS, Microsoft, and Google] are some of the biggest contributors to open source.
True, but their contributions are quite selective. Google writes very good infrastructure code. However OSS DBMS services are quite different. They tend to originate in companies with data problems. Sometimes that's a company like Google or Microsoft, but more often it's a company like Facebook that has an issue processing a lot of data.
BTW I'm not so sure AWS counts as a big OSS contributor. They use it but don't really make a lot of contributions back. This may change over time.
Disclaimer: I work at Altinity, which offers support and software for ClickHouse. (Incidentally written by Yandex to process their clickstream data.)
Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source
#140paying a company is not 'open' anything